This week, on the ground in Guyana, I ended up in an online conversation with my friend George Jardim (East Coast businessman and erstwhile musician) that involved our various dialect pronunciations or creations across the Caribbean.  As someone like George, who grew up familiar with that form in Guyana, I had, from those early years, an irritation with the people who would often correct me to say “you’re using bad English,” or “that’s not proper English” and here we are in 2018 and that attitude is still around.

Beyond that, as someone involved with the deliberate creation of Caribbean music going back now some 60 years, it is interesting that while the dialect is there in my songs, it comes largely as interjection or emphasis.      Continue reading →